I’d like to start this post by saying that I am so happy I have chosen House as the film I’m creating art for, and that we’re exploring editorial illustration. It is giving me the opportunity to explore materials and art styles that I have never done before, or even though I would ever do. The fact the visuals are so naïve and childlike has led me down the road of trying childlike materials such as crayons, and their adult cousin, soft pastels, which I’ve surprisingly really enjoyed doing. I feel as if this project is making me grow so much as an illustrator, more than the previous ones because I am so far out of my comfort zone, and thoroughly enjoying being so, that I’m considering keeping these materials in my illustrative arsenal and looking more into Editorial illustration as a potential path for me to go down, whether it’s side projects to add to my income or as a full time career. I need to research the field a lot more before I make any sort of concrete decision but I didn’t really think about it before this project and I feel as if my eyes have been opened up to the world of editorial illustration and it’s definitely got my interest.

Over the weekend I started what I hope are my final spot illustrations, having chosen soft pastels as the material I am going to use for them because of their boldness, messiness and ability to create interesting textures that I simply could not achieve with watercolour paint or digital painting. I also used a Japanese brush pen to draw linework around them to make them stand out more, I feel as if this is the best way for me to create them because I have used pens in my art pretty much consistently throughout my life and they also help me to contain the soft pastels a little bit and make the designs even bolder in the process. I still have a long way to go with using soft pastels, I need a lot more practice with them before the illustrations can be considered ready to be presented on my final design because I don’t have much experience with them prior to this week and they are difficult for me to get used to.

As well as creating some spot illustrations at the start of the week, I have taken a bit of a U-turn as far as my front cover design for the LWL project goes, I was initially heading down the path of developing my cracked mirror design, and even went as far as creating a few media tests with decollage while I tried to figure out how to achieve the effect I wanted, but it just wasn’t working out. I realised that design was something I would feel comfortable doing and not necessarily something that would fit with the overall tone of House. Instead, I have chosen to develop my design that focuses on Blanche as the main character because I feel that she is the most recognisable film and focusing on only one character for the film fits with the layout that LWL magazines use on their front covers. I am worried that changing my mind about the front cover this late in the project could jeopardise the rest of my work because I am going to have to change the aesthetic a bit from what I was originally going for. I am hoping that this isn’t going to be much of a problem because my development piece has been done in soft pastel and brush pen, alike the spot illustrations I over the last weekend so at least there is some consistency with them. I haven’t really thought about how my spot illustrations are going to be presented on the page at this point, I’ve been focusing a lot on creating the art, rather than the layout which I realise isn’t a good thing because the layout of a magazine is just as important as the art inside it. Next week I really need to spend a lot of time creating potential layout sheets and thinking about where things should be placed on the page.